Ethnicity, Well-Being, and the Organization of Labor among Shade Tobacco Workers

Abstract

The cultivation and processing of shade tobacco in the Connecticut River Valley (United States) is highly specialized and labor intensive and is dependent on a multi-ethnic workforce of migrant farm workers from Latin America and the West Indies. Production is structured through an ethnically reified division of labor, constituted by historical migration patterns, English language ability, and racially informed perceptions of what constitutes a “good worker.” Regardless of position, these workers find themselves geographically and socially isolated and subjected to hazardous and exploitative working conditions. This article will explore the effects of these conditions on workers’ physical and emotional well-being. Using Foucault's notion of governmentality, the article demonstrates the ways in which these deleterious effects are embedded in workers’ internalizing of race and ethnicity as naturalizing principles for self-regulation and the organization of work and in neoliberal forces that produce a surplus of temporary, highly mobile workers from the global south.